THE E-SHOPPER.

Trading thick for thin eases wallet woes

May 14, 2005|By Michelle Slatalla, New York Times News Service.

In the 1960s, my father's scuffed brown leather wallet contained all the things a man needed to navigate the world: cash, his driver's license and a claim check to retrieve the radio from the repair store.

Then credit cards took over the world. Nowadays a wallet is a beast of burden, swollen with the major brands, not to mention cards for automated teller machines, insurance plans and employee ID scanners.

Put one of those bloated wallets into a back pocket, sit on it, and you will look like my husband. One of his shoulders is about 2 inches higher than the other.

"Have you seen my glasses?" he asked the other night.

"They're next to you on the table," I said.

Slowly, he swiveled the entire top half of his body until the eyeglasses came into view. As his fingers closed around them, he winced. He looked as creaky as the Tin Man headed to Oz.

"Should I get the oil can?" I asked.

"Neck hurts," he said, careful not to move his lips.

It wouldn't take a genius to suspect a connection between his neck problems and his wallet. My hunch was confirmed by a spokesman for the American Chiropractic Association, who said fat wallets--already notorious for causing the leg and lower back pain known as sciatica--are bad news for the whole musculoskeletal system.

"Does your husband sit for a long time on his wallet?" asked Dr. Jerome F. McAndrews, the national spokesman for the association.

"All day," I said.

"Then it's possible his neck pain is related to the wallet," McAndrews said. "The minute you force one side of the pelvis forward from having that thick wallet in a pocket, you are rotating virtually every vertebra in the spine. The vertebrae above compensate for the rotation so that he can sit up straight."

The best cure I could think of was to go online to buy something more neck-friendly. But what? My husband is a traditionalist. Not for him the camouflage big-shoulder messenger bag ($42) from EBags.com or the lightweight Hawaiian surf print wallet ($4.97) at MaiKaiHawaii.com. Nor could I picture him carrying a shiny, quilted day bag like the one listed in Zappos.com's "Men's Accessories" category ($65.95).

"Brown," he said, economizing on verbs to avert pain. "Or black."

"I found a nice black nylon man-bag for $40," I said, showing him a printout from Man-n-Bag.com. "It has a pocket for gadgets and a key chain docking clip."

"Shoulder strap?" he asked suspiciously.

"Yes," I admitted.

"It's a murse," he said, using the man-purse's nickname to avoid a second syllable. "No."

"The site's FAQ says there's no such thing as a man-purse," I read aloud. "`Man-purse is an oxymoron.'"

"Need wallet that probably doesn't exist," he said. "Impossibly thin but also able to hold everything. Yet must flatten like pancake when I sit."

Inspired by this vision of a superhero wallet, I did a Google keyword search for "world's thinnest wallet."

The next morning I was on the phone with Cindy Whitehawk, the co-owner of NoBulges.com. Displayed on the site were photos of a beefy leather wallet alongside her company's wafer-thin All-Ett, made of rip-stop nylon, with a "patented side-by-side design that creates four pockets for cards."

"My husband, Ken Obenski, is an engineer, and he invented the All-Ett after he had sciatica problems," Whitehawk said. "Before we took it to market, we had them in a hundred guys' pockets for six months to test and get feedback."

The All-Ett, which Whitehawk said was as thin as a dime, unfolds to reveal two panels, each of which snugly holds two stacks of credit cards (up to 30). It comes in seven colors, including black but not brown, and costs $14.95.

When I asked Whitehawk about competitors, she scoffed. "There's one made of leather that claims to be the thinnest," she said. "But leather? Right there, a piece of leather is 10 times thicker."

I ordered one in traditional black (the cost was $18.16, including tax and ground shipping). While awaiting the mail, I decided to investigate a leather competitor--called the Slimmy--which comes in black and brown, costs $29, claims to be "the world's slimmest wallet" and is sold exclusively online at sites like Koyono.com and Amazon.com.

Jay Yoo, president of Koyono, said: "We haven't found anything slimmer. Have we checked it against every wallet in the world? If I had that kind of time, that would be a great thing to do."

He mailed me a review model.

I lined up the competitors directly in my husband's line of vision. The Slimmy was slightly fatter--maybe a dime's worth--and looked more like a business-card holder with multiple sleeves than a full-fledged wallet.

I watched my husband load the contents from his old wallet into each. The Slimmy could hold only 10 cards before they started to slip out into his back pocket (a problem that disappeared after he moved the wallet to a front pocket on the advice of Yoo).

The All-Ett comfortably held all 23 of his cards and had room for more. Both were less than half an inch thick and, when pocketed, were far more comfortable than the old, bulky wallet.

During a sit-down test, the All-Ett's rip-stop nylon made a crinkling noise, which my husband said sounded as if "I'm wearing diapers."

Two days later, however, he said he had grown fond of the crinkling. "It's so thin that otherwise I wouldn't know it was in my pocket," he said.